A cheetah licked my frisbee!

Hi again :) well, last week, my family and I along with the rest of this year's VSO volunteers all went to a place called Mariantel right on the edge of the Kalahari desert ! We stayed in a really nice lodge just out of Mariantelle called "Lapa lange Lodge". Once we had arrived, after a 4 1/2 hour drive, we were shown to where we were going to be staying for the next week and it was great! We were staying in a 4 bedroomed chalet with two bathrooms, a kitchen with a bar and a livingroom leading outside! We were sharing the chalet with another family from Canada, with an eight year old girl called Kaia (Kiya) and her seven year old brother Jake. Their parents Yvonne and Cameron had their own bedroom, my parents did as well, Cam and Jake had their own room and I shared a bedroom with Kaia.

In the morning once everyone had woken up we went for breakfast at seven o'clock sharp, yawn :) after breakfast the adults went to the conference room to talk about their jobs so the kids just went of and we just did our own thing. About half an hour before lunch I went back to the chalet to pour a drink for everyone when I looked up at the waterhole and saw four adult ostriches and four chicks and they were so cute. I decided to name two of them I called the adult one flump and the baby one cupcake. There was also a swimming pool, well I say I mean a 2 meter long puddle filled with slimy frogs which I only found out about after I jumped into the pool, and boy did I get a fright :O "Ahhh....!"

The next day once the adults had gone off to do some more training I suggested that we should go to the giant cheetah enclosure to have a look at the cheetah. This was all going well until Cameron decided to have a game of frisbee and guess what? Yes, of course, it went over the fence. The boys ran off leaving Kaia and I to rescue the frisbee, great.

We decided to go and tell the barmaid in the main lodge what had happened so she told the cheetah feeder. He didn't speak english so we couldn't really understand what he was saying but he tied a coat hanger to a really long pole and stuck in through the fence but it wasn't long enough. He said "me go get car" and he came back in an open bakkie, which Kaia and I jumped in, and went through the gate. He chucked a bit of chicken leg to distract the cheetah and quickly got the frisbee.

Eilidh Rose

Alan's musings......

We have no dew here in Windhoek and the earth is generally very dry. But I was at a meeting in town the other week and as I left, there was sheet lightening across the night sky, the sound of thunder and the wind through the trees. “Can you smell that Alan?” asked my colleague. I could smell a sweet almost sickly sweet smell. “It’s like nectar” I said. “That’s the smell of damp earth, and that’s the reason we can never leave Africa” she said. And I think I understood. That despite the hardships, the suffering, there is always hope, always promise, always beauty.

The skies are ever changing this time of year. There’s the intense blue, so intense it’s hard to imagine, but sometimes grey as the dust builds during the day to a glorious red at sundown, the sun dropping quickly below the horizon. Dusk is all of ten minutes here, from brightness to darkness in just ten minutes.

We’ve made some good friends already. Other volunteers, staff at VSO, one of whom is almost a neighbour (and whose given us a washing machine for the year – which is great!) and my friend Johannas who tells me now I’m to call him Iita, his ‘house’ name, the name his family call him. Johannas is a popular name amongst black Nambians as is Pieters. Basically John and Peter – Christian names. Often white Namibians if they don’t know a black Namibian’s name will refer to him as Johannas or Pieters. Like using Paddy for an Irishman or Jock for a Scot, I suppose. I can see it angers Johannas. So now I call him Iita. I asked him what Iita means. “It means War” he said. I must have looked surprised. I couldn’t at that moment think why anyone would call a child ‘War’. “It’s because I was born in the war, the liberation struggle” he said. Later, I met his wee nephew, he’s just four years old and runs everywhere, is into everything and all at once. “We nicknamed him "Omshasho” said his auntie laughing, then explaining to me, the foreigner, “you know, the weapon that bursts and fires in all directions at once”. She was referring to a cluster bomb. So I have a friend called War who has a nephew called Cluster Bomb. My experiences of war are, thank God, only through the pages of a newspaper, for Iita and his family war was all around them, penetrating their beings even to their very names.

We’re off camping at the weekend, to Gross Barmen, a small game park with a natural hot spring. I read the description from the guidebook to Cameron. Told him about the palm fringed swimming pool, the hot springs, the braii (barbecue), the game walks, the dry river bed, the lookout, the zebra and baboons. “Well what do you think?” I said looking into his widening blue eyes. “heaven” he said “It sounds like heaven”. Maybe it will be.

Have a good week everyone.

Alan

Our Weekend of Adventure

Still excited about our recent purchase of our new Nissan Patrol (I use the term ‘new’ loosely, the beast is nearly 18 years old and has already done 280,000kms), we loaded up the tank with camp beds, tents, coolbox and enough munchies to feed a small town (or at least keep the kids happy in the back) and headed to the coast.

Breaking the journey at Okahanja on Friday night, we joined other volunteers for a ranch style meal where Alan had the biggest steak had ever seen in his life. His mum would have been proud of him as he struggled on and managed to devour every last morsel, something he regretted for the next four days as it lay in his stomach like a goat in the pit of a python.

Swakopmund was our destination, with the spectacular 380 km transition from semi-arid bushland to white desert providing the in-flight entertainment. We pitched our tents in the grounds of the Youth Hostel (we won’t talk about the facilities here) ideally placed to explore the rather strange town on foot. Late in the afternoon we took the back road to Walvis Bay with ideas of a gentle stroll up the famous Dune 7 to witness a spectacular sunset with our new friends.

The near vertical climb to the top of this mighty sand dune nearly finished me off, how the kids ran up and down it I can’t quite fathom, the camera I was carrying must have been what hampered me…….however, despite the clouds and subsequent lack of sunset, the views from the ridge were AMAZING, almost worth the pain.

On Sunday morning we finetuned our sandboarding skills with Alter Action and Eilidh and Cameron jointly broke the speed record for our group clocking up measured speeds of an impressive 69 km/h. As I watched my 10 year old been given some basic instruction before being pushed headfirst on a piece of plywood, into a 500 ft sand gully, I was grateful that I am not the worrying kind.

Eilidh's thoughts on school

I went into a high school called St.George’ College about 3 days ago now and sat an hour and a half test to see if I could get a place in the school. Yesterday we received an e-mail from the school saying if I had passed or failed the test which I hadn’t :-D So the school says that I can either go into grade 7 just now and then go into grade 8 in January, go in to grade 8 just now, grade 8 is the same as 2^nd year in the UK, and then start grade 9 in Jan’ but grade 9 is like 3^rd year and I’m only in 2^nd year back in Scotland so the school doesn’t think that I would be ready for grade 9 in January and grade 7 is still in primary school here and I don’t want to go back to primary school, no way. So we have decided that I’m going to start grade 8 in High School in January so that’s cool. Till then Mum says that she can teach Cam and I at home but Mum’s idea of teaching seems to be a 3 mile walk every morning…not so cool.

Today we walked into town and went to a bushman art gallery because yesterday I did some research on the bushmen tribes in Namibia and I found out that by the age of twelve, a bushman child on average knows 200 different plant species and an adult bushman knows about 300. I tried to figure out how many plant species I knew by writing them all down, but I only got to 50 odd plants until I couldn’t think of any more. The “art gallery turned out just to be an overpriced gift shop with dead animal skins everywhere, but seeing all of the pretty jewellery was good and there is a really nice pair of earrings there that I’m going to buy next time go into town even though they are $49.99, that’s £5.00 in the UK !!! What a rip off.

I haven’t seen any cool animals yet except a couple of lizards, a gecko and a warthog when we first got off the plane. Dad reckons that he saw some monkeys on the way to the house, but nobody really believes him :) We are going to go camping as soon as we get a good enough car according to Dad and then we can go see some more exciting animals eg’ hippo’s and even lions :) :) :)

Eilidh Rose

Settling in....

Well, after a frantic few days tracking down passports, chasing up visas, finishing up at school and a whirlwind of folk visiting and goodbye get togethers, as well as packing up a decade’s worth of domestic detritus, we finally made it to Glasgow airport last Saturday (thanks bruv) without too many tears. We had excellent trip with Emirates Airlines and a smooth transfer at Dubia and Johannesburg airports. The SA Airways staff kindly turned a blind eye to our excess baggage (only 20 kg each for this part) when I explained with a smile that most of it was Lego.

Saara from VSO met us at the airport in Windhoek some 30 hours after we had left Mum’s house the previous morning, and greeted us with the news that a house on the outskirts of the city had been found for us. We didn’t have long too unpack as we were due to meet up with the other new volunteers in the legendary Joe’s Bar 45 minutes later. We had a quick shower and off we went, how we all kept awake for another few hours, I’m not sure.

Last week was full on with the VSO induction training. The staff here are great and a breath of fresh air. Within two days they had found a fridge for us, and today, we took delivery of an old mountain bike for Alan to cycle to work to, they really are trying to help us settle in.

The house itself is great, a three bedroom bungalow in typical (black) Namibian style. We have hot water, electricity -albeit rather dodgy- and a lovely outdoor room to sit out in the evenings and watch the world go by. Even the plastic flowers, bright pink lacy net curtains and outlandish pictures are growing on me. The owners have moved into their garage for the time being while their other smaller bungalow is being vacated by other tenants. The guilt didn’t last long.